I know the name doesn't conjure a thing of particular beauty but, for my money, hogweed is one of the glories of Claxton in June. In the past we may not have appreciated its strange, robust aesthetics, but we definitely valued the plant for its utility. The reference to pigs (like the alternatives of "cow-cakes" in Somerset or "cow clogweed" in Scotland) drew on the fact that it was gathered as fodder for livestock. According to Geoffrey Grigson's wonderful study of plant culture, The Englishman's Flora, its leaves and shoots taste of asparagus and he knew even in the 1950s of farmers who would bundle it up for the sty.

It's not only a plant for summer. I love it just as much in winter, although its effects upon us are then largely subliminal. Those huge triffid-like columns that look so ineradicably healthy now, wither and dry slowly over the autumn, until they are mere hollowed-out skeletons by November. When the snow falls the residual architecture of its multiple stems and umbels often catches the snow so that the hogweed buckles under the dead weight. But still the plant stands. Defiant amid the grey skies and whitened landscape, hogweed seems to persist as a monument to a glorious sun-blessed planet we once inhabited and called "summer".

I have to confess I have a very particular relationship with the plant now because I have acquired a passion for photographing insects. My two girls, who themselves had grown like hogweed in recent years, beg me not to tell anyone, lest they think me strange. One of my curious activities is to stand by the hogweed to observe its millions of visitors. Other members of the umbellifer family draw in the beetles and the hoverflies, but nothing quite magnetises the invertebrate world like flowering hogweed. Insects seem to luxuriate in those vast fresh plates of whiteness, and I and they attend the plant like so many worshippers at a shrine.